The Texture of Want

Feb 24, 2018 - Mar 17, 2018

284 Seigel Street1B
Brooklyn,
NY 11206

Phone Number:

630-660-6788

Contact:

Michael Fleming

Description:

MOUNTAIN is pleased to present The Texture of Want, an exhibition featuring artwork by Dalia Amara and Olivia Swider. The artwork on view explores constructions of femininity, vulnerable self-reflexivity, and fallacy in the truth of images. Both artists have a background in image-making and the study of photography, but the way they synthesize that knowledge into their respective practices varies. While Amara’s work functions in the realm of photography, the content and context takes a more sculptural/performative turn. Conversely, Swider’s practice incorporates physical works and found materials to ask new questions around what constitutes an image, appropriation/ authorship, and the documentary/indexical capabilities of objects and the stories they hold. Together, these artists present a fascinating look at a postmodern approach to capturing and creating an image. Dalia Amara’s work hones in on the performance of femininity. In recent video works the artist turns the camera’s voyeuristic eye on herself in an examination of learned behaviors, societal expectations, and the psychological struggles of being a woman. The mirror is a testing ground and the artist inhabits a duality as both photographer and model, audience and performer. Amara’s photographic works use the conventions of photography, but the visual language of sculpture. In these works the camera captures domestic scenes and curious objects with a reference to the body in absentia. The lack of a protagonist gives these photographs an unsettling tension. Like a crime scene investigator searching for the last bit of evidence to solve the mystery. Working through text, photography, assembled sculpture, and found imagery, Olivia Swider’s autobiographical approach sits on the crux of truth and hearsay. Pulling events and incidents out of context, the artist uses words and stories told in person and derived from gossip transactions. Swider is interested in the nightmarish qualities lingering from love ghosts, the allure of oyster pearls, the beach, quantum entanglement, and the complications of failed love. She works in a variety of mediums while subtly suggesting questions of staged and candidness, found and created, and the truths and lies in authorship.